multi Fifty word science fiction stories

[William Overington]

[William Overington]

I had the idea for the story and I decided to try to produce it in Affinity Publisher, writing the story directly into the text frame. Yet I could not find how to do a word count in Affinity Publisher, so I used the word count facility in PagePlus X7. Is there a word count facility in Affinity Publisher please?

I added some text so that the story became exactly fifty words in length.

I used an A5 landscape format and used Goudita SF as the font. I initially typeset in 24 point but found that 30 point filled the area better, though I did need to lower the lower margin a little. I then moved the whole text frame up a bit.

William

 

[walt.farrell]

3 hours ago, William Overington said:

Is there a word count facility in Affinity Publisher please?

No. It's been requested, though.

[William Overington]

 

[William Overington]

I wrote the first story this morning. I wrote the second story some time after publishing the first story.

Something that I would have liked to do but could not find out how to do it is line spacing, that is the leading. For example in the first two lines the p in 'starship' and the h in 'the' seem too close to each other. The help facility says it is under Paragraph panel but I cannot find it.

William

 

[walt.farrell]

Tooltips are your friend

There's also an override to that in the Character panel and in the Context Toolbar.

[A_B_C]

These stories are a lovely idea. 

[William Overington]

[William Overington]

Thank you. The text is 30 point with the Paragraph Leading [sic] at 33 point.

I used to handset metal type and the leading was actually pieces of lead a few points thick. We used to use 2 point leading.

I think of the leading in the above piece of text as being 3 point.

When I saw 30 point in the Paragraph Leading box I took it as being the point size of the type

William

 

 

[William Overington]

1 hour ago, A_B_C said:

These stories are a lovely idea. 

Thank you.

I first read of fifty word science fiction stories somewhere some years ago, but until today I had not tried writing any myself.

William

 

 

[William Overington]

[smadell]

I stumbled upon your (ultra) short science fiction stories – what a fascinating idea. I just had to try. Here's my contribution. For info's sake, this is a 6x4 inch page with 1/4-inch margins all around. The font is ITC Korinna, and the paragraph was set to justified (both left and right, and vertically). The word count was done in Nisus Writer Pro, my word processor of choice.

[William Overington]

Excellent. Thank you for posting.

William

 

[William Overington]

[William Overington]

In case anyone is wondering, the solid in the story in the previous post is an extruded regular nonagon extruded just enough such that the area of each of the two end facets (each a regular nonagon) has the same area as each of the nine rectangular facets produced by the extrusion process. For a very long extrusion the end facets would each have a smaller area than each of the side facets. For a very small extrusion the end facets would each have a larger area than each of the side facets. At some particular extrusion the end facets would each have the same area as each of the side facets.

William

 

[smadell]

Somebody make it stop!

[William Overington]

Thank you.

What is the font that you used please?

William

 

[A_B_C]

16 hours ago, William Overington said:

I used to handset metal type and the leading was actually pieces of lead a few points thick. We used to use 2 point leading.

You are right, the setting that goes by the name of “Leading” should be more properly called “Line Height,” as it refers to the distance between one baseline to the next. But I fear “leading” has won the day, even if it’s historically an improper term. 

[William Overington]

Regarding the story of the troll.

1. Suppose that the narrator is telling the truth.

Then the friend is lying.

The friend says that the narrator is telling the truth, therefore the narrator would be lying.

Oops!

2. Suppose that the narrator is lying.

Then the friend is telling the truth.

The friend says that the narrator is telling the truth, therefore the narrator would be telling the truth.

Ooops!

Years ago I put a series of three electronic NOT gates in series and fed back the result to the beginning. No input value, it just ran. The circuitry did not explode, but as there is a small propagation delay in electronic circuitry, then the output viewed on an oscilloscope was a very high frequency square wave. I di not think at the time but if I had made the length of wire for the feedback loop longer I might have been able to slow down the frequency of the oscillations a little.

William

 

 

 

[smadell]

William...

I wish you had asked sooner. I trashed the original document in which the "troll story" was written, and I just don't remember the font that I used. Sorry!

[William Overington]

1 hour ago, smadell said:

William...

I wish you had asked sooner. I trashed the original document in which the "troll story" was written, and I just don't remember the font that I used. Sorry!

Thank you for replying. The font is nice and clear, a good choice.

William

 

 

[MikeW]

1 hour ago, smadell said:

William...

I wish you had asked sooner. I trashed the original document in which the "troll story" was written, and I just don't remember the font that I used. Sorry!

Looks like Warnock Pro.

[v_kyr]

On 12/23/2019 at 1:18 PM, walt.farrell said:

On 12/23/2019 at 9:35 AM, William Overington said:

Is there a word count facility in Affinity Publisher please?

No. It's been requested, though.

In the meantime one can use several workarounds depending on the OS people are using.

MacOS/OSX related:

• Make a Word & Character Counting Service for All Apps in Mac OS X
• How to Set Up a System-Wide Word Count Service on Your Mac
• WordCounter
• etc.

Windows related:

• Wordcount
• CountAnything
• etc.

Online services:

• wordcounter
• count words free
• wordcounttools
• etc.

Further there are a bunch of Browser (firefox, chrome and so on) related tools available.

BTW, a nice among OS portable writing tool is Typora!

[smadell]

24 minutes ago, MikeW said:

Looks like Warnock Pro.

You're absolute right, MikeW. The font is Warnock Pro.

[MikeW]

9 minutes ago, smadell said:

You're absolute right, MikeW. The font is Warnock Pro.

I think I was correct once before, but I may have been mistaken ;^)

Warnock Std./Pro has a couple distinctive letter shapes. The tail of the 'y,' the ear on the 'g,' etc.